Saturday, June 24, 2006

So animal a human

Humanity has done well moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs; in the developed world we now have the luxury of spending a minimum of time and effort meeting our physical needs.

However, we are still stalled on a primitive level... The vast majority of our time, at all levels of society, is spent on meeting our emotional needs, at the expense of further developing our intelligence capabilities. We fill our days attempting to meet a panoply of emotional needs: belongingness, love, recognition, acceptance, being understood and avoiding loneliness, to name a few. All of these feelings are subjective and depend to some degree on other humans. If you do not think you behave this way, take an inventory of your significant efforted activities and major life circumstances and trace down to the reasons that you are doing them. It is also easy to identify in the behavior of others.

The future evolution of the human includes devoting substantial time and energy to the more objective focus of intellectual pursuits, which is not only more useful to humanity but also in fact more effectively satisfies emotional needs and occupies the top of Maslow's hierarchy, actualization.

Personalized pharmacogenetic and hormone therapies may enable us to better identify and manage the impact of human emotions and emotional need-directed behavior as well as the more immediately available "software upgrade" techniques such as neuro-linguistic programming.

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